Sony PRS-500 Reader Review

Here is a picture of my Sony PRS-500 reader. I set this outside in the noonday sun and snapped off a digital picture. What should strike you right away is that the text is legible and that is due to something new...

Sony PRS-500

ADDENDUM: Here is another link

This reader uses a new display technology called E-Ink, also known as an electronic paper display. My layman understanding of it goes like this. Imagine magnetic ball-bearings painted half-black and half-white. Imagine that beneath these ball-bearings is a magnet whose polarity can be reversed. Imagine that when this polarity is reversed the black half of the ball-bearing is either attracted to the magnet or repulsed by it (thereby showing the white half).

What makes this technology especially well-suited to books, aside from it's black-and-white nature, is that it works in bright sun or the direct glare of a reading lamp. In fact, I would say that the contrast improves with light, as opposed to a normal laptop which glares illegibly. Also, the Reader only needs to consume power when reversing the polarity of the tiny magnets and therefore boasts a long life per charge.

While there are reviews "out there on the web", many of them seem to miss an important distinction. The Sony reader is not meant to be a replacement for a laptop computer, but rather a replacement for a book. As such, the interface to the device consists mainly in menus to navigate your library and to turn pages. I feel that is a strength, rather than a weakness, having seen countless confusing contraptions collapse under the weight of all their functionality.

Some of the most common complaints seem to be:

1. The book cannot be searched.
2. You cannot double-click on a word and jump to a dictionary definition.
3. The book does not have it's own light source.

These complaints can all be directed at Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice" in traditional book form.

When you compare the Reader to a book, rather than to a computer, you arrive at different conclusions.

The Major Advantages
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1. Sony claims that the e-book can store 80 normal books. I cannot personally vouch for that fact, but it can easily store the 11 I currently have on it.
   
2. At the press of a button you can increase or decrease the font size, so near-sighted people (or is that far-sighted people), ought to be able to read a book at a more natural distance (particularly relevant on a plane or bus I imagine).
3. The battery life ought to be sufficient to cover a normal vacation without the need of dragging cumbersome chords that may not work at your destination anyway.
4. In addition to handling Sony's e-book format, the reader can also store RTF documents and PDF files. It can also store unencrypted MP3 and AAC files. The audio file format support means you may store audio books on the device, although you may want to spring for...
5. The Reader supports removable memory sticks and SD memory cards to increase the storage space.
6. You can authorize a book for 6 machines, one of which must be a computer.
   

The Cons
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1. When you change the font size you will notice that the necessary and expected reformat causes the number of pages to change. After thinking about this I realized it could be a problem, since how is one supposed to cite a quote in a bibliography?
2. When you purchase books it must be through Sony's storefront. That is a real shame since they don't have an impressive catalog (no Richard Dawkins for instance, who seems everywhere but in Sony's bookstore). I am certain someone at Sony saw Apples's success with iTunes and decided to duplicate it. I am not certain that this same someone knew what they were looking at, since the MP3 format is ubiquitous. I seem not to be alone in stating that this is the biggest limitation of using the Sony Reader. To stifle competition from the get-go seems a no-no to me.
   
3. I am finding footnotes difficult, if not downright cumbersome, to deal with. I am currently reading a book by Walter Isaacson on Einstein and I haven't figured out how to view a footnote that I encounter. To navigate up, then into the table of contents, then to the footnotes at the end of the book is distracting and time-consuming. Worse, however, is that you always "continue reading" from the last viewed page which in this case would now be the footnote you just viewed. That means you need to navigate to the history and find the page you were on there and jump back to it. All this means that footnotes are too bothersome to reference which is a shame. The process would be much smoother if the reader had a hyperlink and a back button.
4. Since the reader is dependent upon Sony's PC-based software to purchase books, that makes purchasing books while traveling unfeasible unless you drag along a computer too. The trick, then, will be to purchase all your books ahead-of-time unless Sony finds a way to sell a book outside their current strategy. This is perhaps why it is unwise of Sony to stifle content competition from the start.
   

This review will very likely be supplemented in the future with additional reviews. For instance, I haven't told you about the Reader's support for RSS feeds.

All-in-all let me sum up by saying the reader sports a revolutionary display technology (albeit black-and-white), long battery life, ample space to store many books, and is comfortable to read.